A whole month has now passed since the school took aggressive and unreasonable action against our children and our family, there has been no clear reason given, either for the exclusion of the children from school, or for the involvement of police and trespass orders.

Furthermore our actions of protest since this event have been liberally used as justification for the event itself  with zero attention to chronology or the immorality of being so inaccurate.

As we are an immigrant family, and moreover one who will be applying for residency within the next few months, we are heavily compromised by the situation in terms of imminent police checks that will form part of our application.....

So much as we would like to leave the situation alone, given the school’s resistance to acknowledging its mistakes and doing the right thing by our kids, we cannot afford to do so.

We have informed the school, therefore, of our intention to seek legal representation on the basis of the obvious human rights abuse that has taken place.  We are currently doing this although we do not hold out much hope of finding any legal aid to enable us to take this through due process.

Failing that, the only option we will have to bring the truth of the situation to light is to do just that and shed much more light onto it so that the Immigration Authorities can see that we are fighting this injustice which could jeopardise our future in New Zealand.

We regret the effect that such legal action and unwanted publicity will have for ourselves and our children and also for the school and all who belong to its “community”.  We reserve the right, however, to protect our own interests, reputation and children from slander, perfidy, injustice and potential deportation by whatever means we can find.

We do not feel we have any choice in the matter and are sure that all those who will doubtless criticise us for this as well, would not hesitate to do the same had they found themselves in our position.

The only way to avoid this action is to remove the trespass orders with an acknowledgement that they should never have been applied, which will in turn involve admitting the mis-management and mistakes that led to them in the first place.

Your Rights in a Private School

One of the most difficult parts of this whole process has been trying to find our way through the labyrinthine structure that is the Steiner School.

We told the school several times that we felt they needed help with this aspect of running the school and yet we held off out of concern that the Anthroposophical base of the school might not be understood by outside agencies.

On the day we eventually told the Ministry about the school and our problems, we were told that they had ‘no jurisdiction’ as the school in private and non-integrated.

We may cynically speculate that Management already knew this as indeed they should.  This puts a different light on much of the later correspondence before we were kicked out.

Although we believe that in fact there are areas where the Ministry can help us, and where they have a duty to get involved, we have not been able to find out about this yet.

The only thing we did discover, when we suddenly realised that [Z], being in kindy on the 20 hours scheme, was definitely under the Ministry’s care, was that the day she was excluded permanently from kindy was the very day that their care of her ceased, being 28 days after her 5th birthday.

I’m afraid, given the evidence, we must again cynically speculate that some of the ‘delays’ in organising meetings may have been to give this date time to roll around and ensure that we had no automatic way of involving them.

The fact is simply that if we had been ousted the previous week the ministry would have been able to help us.

We will now research this matter thoroughly and give parents the information they need to know about with regard to their rights in the Titirangi Steiner School.